**BREAKING NEWS! !**
Circon has just released full LonMark® certified elevator control and complete badge printing for it's already powerful Access Control Solution!
Capable of performing individual floor-by-floor control, you're now unlimited in how many elevator cabs and how many floors you need the system to manage within a facility. Each floor can have unique schedules, unique access privileges, anti-tailgating and “which button pressed” feedback information all from our simple front-end interface!
In addition, we've also just released full badge printing capability through the integration of industry standard badge printing software and badge printers! It's easy to use – you enter the access users information (including pictures and custom field information etc) in the Access Integrator Database and use that same information to create custom cards for your customers! This can be functionality you offer your customers or better yet – it can be a service you offer your customers!
Call your Circon representative for more details!
NEW ACCESS CONTROL TRAINING
We're extremely pleased with the rapid uptake of our new access control system and also with the feedback we've received from those who have installed it. In particular people are pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to install and commission, and to find that the margins they can make tend to be far greater than they expected. However – as this is a bit of a new industry for a lot of you, Circon wants to do what we can to make it as easy as possible to learn how to include access control in your offerings.
We've recently finished the beta run of the new Access Control training session and we're very happy with the content of the course and with the increase in knowledge of those who took advantage of our first run. Based on feedback from that course we're now finishing the fine-tuning the material.
If you're even considering making access control part of your product offering we can't encourage you enough to come visit us for a few days and take the class. We start from the beginning – introducing industry terms, explain how best to design systems and what components to pick and use, to how to configure the APC-300 to make it do the tricks you want it to do. We then go on into the Access Integrator 3 front-end package and how it can be configured so you can simply say “yes” when your customers ask for something. We teach about total system interoperability and how powerful and easy it is and we teach not just how to “do” access control, but also how to sell it and how to position your company as a progressive leader in full Facility Automation. You can make money with this stuff, and we want to show you how.
Our next Access control course will be held July 24th through July 28th in Vancouver. We highly recommend that you consider your sales staff in addition to your technical staff for this course as they will be able to understand just how simple this product is to sell, install and commission. And of course Vancouver is incredible during this time of year and it would be a fantastic time to bring your spouse and call it a vacation!
Hope to see you then!
ASHRAE 2006
The AHR show held in Chicago this year was a little bit different for us. Over the last few years we've been having a harder and harder time justifying the tremendous cost of attending the show so this year we thought we'd try a bit of an experiment. Instead of having our own piece of rented real estate, we teamed up with LonMark (International and Americas) and focused on helping them create an effective co-operative booth.
We were successful.
LonMark hired Circon to function as a total System Integrator for their “Interoperability Truss”. This demonstration was an expanded derivative of our “Den of Interoperability” that we displayed at last year's AHR show in Orlando FL. We successfully installed and integrated over 40 unique products from over 30 unique vendors on one twisted pair network. This network was then shared with (up to) eight individual vendors who used it for their unique versions of show and tell using direct connect, remote LNS client, LON over IP and simple Ethernet connections. We were one of the vendors with controllers on the truss as well as with software products on display.
The truss performed flawlessly for the entire show
John Cain, Ted Prime and Rob Stokes were kept hopping talking to those of you who found the time to come to the show as well as by introducing ourselves to potential new integrators. Ted also spent a lot of time talking to vendors already involved in our 3 rd party program and to many others who would like to be part of it. Our access control system was a huge draw as was our new SCC-310 line of controllers. We had a lot of fun setting up and demonstrating true interoperability between our products and those from a myriad of manufacturers and we took tremendous pride in showing the BACnet crew who snuck over to the booth that yes – it's just that easy!
To all of those we saw, thanks for coming and helping our show presence be a success. Based on what we've learned from our attendance this year it's our current belief that we'll do the same co-operative approach at next years AHR show (in Dallas TX) as well. If you have comments one-way or the other, please let us know.
FYI
Education spending up 14% this year, 11% increase expected in '07
Construction spending on education facilities rebounded to double-digit growth last fall, following a brief decline during the summer months. Education project starts increased 27.5% between the first and second halves of 2005, according to Reed Construction Data.
